I am attempting to get this card to come up in Ubuntu, however it fails in a most interesting way. When gdm or startx are invoked, it kills all input devices and the screen. I have to basically hard reboot or ssh into it from another host to reboot it as the keyboard is dead.

I have tried the following already:

1) Ubuntu specific drivers, all of them.. all succeed but present same situation as above
2) Disabled/removed nouveau
3) Nvidia specific driver (256) compiles successfully
4) Run nvidia-xconfig as well as try to build my own xorg.conf with a known good profile for said monitor.

I can only get into failsafeX with low res graphics.. attempting to start X in any other way causes a crash.

Included is my bugreport. It basically says that there are screens found but none have a usable configuration, which is interesting since I can use this same X config with other nvidia cards and the same monitor without fail.

I cannot run nvidia-settings because it says I do not have an nvidia driver installed/in use because I'm in failsafe mode. Any suggestions would be helpful.

The Quadro NVS 450 actually has two GPUs on one board. What's most likely happening is that the X server is probing a GPU that doesn't have any displays connected to it.

Try either of the following:

1) Explicitly set a PCI Bus ID in your X configuration; for example, your X log shows that it's trying the GPU at 4:0:0, while your lspci output shows a GPU at 3:0:0 and another at 4:0:0. You can try adding the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf: